“Age is just a number,” one of his more vapid friends had said, trying to be nice, but he was wrong—age was a different continent, and as long as he was with Charles, he would be moored there. Not that he had anywhere else to be. His future was a vague, vaporous thing. He wasn’t alone in this; so many of his friends and classmates were like him, drifting from home to their jobs and then home again before going out at night to bars or clubs or other people’s apartments. They didn’t have money, and who knew how long they would have life? Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like
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